Up until now web applications are developed without giving the developers insight of application administration. On the other hand server farm administration always concentrates on stability and availability of servers. The server farm administrators ignore availability of web applications, their services and versions.
According to the current state of the art in application development, load balancers are in place to provide sufficient application stability as well as application performance. Load balancers provide application processing through one or more server farms. However, the following problems can not yet be solved: To publish a new service or a new version of an already established service may turn out to be a nightmare. Unforeseeable problems or errors become visible. The efforts to fix these problems after the version is public are immense. The loss of financial resources and damage of reputation is the immediate response. It is not possible to reactivate reliable versions on a services granularity to help to avoid damages. Secondly, the ability to apply new releases in place sharing the environment of the productive environment is not at hand. Thirdly, performance means can only be raised indirectly.
Today performance problems are reported by users and seldom foreseen by developers or administrators. Today round trip timers like ICMP (ping) are the basis of diagnostic performance. Today redundant servers grouped in server farms are used to reliably deliver applications. If new services or versions of services are published, a subset of these servers is configured to deliver the new service for public beta test. Today it is not possible to deliver versions of applications on basis of the user request.
Today's server farm administration concentrates on server monitoring and to apply up to date patches. Applications are monitored with standard queries. Today content delivery on application granularity is not conducted. The definition of application compatible frameworks and their maintenance is not part of the server farm administration. The developers perform the server administration their selves and document administrative work badly. To publish a new service or version on an already running server farm implies risks for application delivery, because of insufficient documentation of requirements.
It is an object of the invention to allow version-oriented access to applications.
It is a further object of the invention to standardize and simplify processes of application development, especially web application development.
It is a still further object of the invention to securely process application monitoring and application publishing.